Garfield Hilltop Park

the big picture

the hilltop

Garfield’s 2030 Plan suggests the topography of Garfield should be respected. The
neighborhood should strive for greater density near the flatter edge of Penn Avenue and less density on the hillside. In keeping with this plan, the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation has asked the Housing Authority of Pittsburgh to give up its plan to build housing to replace a demolished housing project on the hill, and instead allow the neighborhood to develop a park there.This topographic map of Garfield from a survey in the 1920s shows the steep topography of the hilltop area, which makes the hilltop a less accessible site for housing but a picturesque place for a park.

stepping it up

As part of their Issues of Practice class in the fall of 2011, a group of Carnegie Mellon architecture students (Young Byun, Sam Faller, Ji Hee Hwang, Karno Widjaja, and Aswin Widjaya) worked on an implementation plan for this incentive. That work is excerpted here. Issues of Practice is one example of the community design collaborations of the Urban Design Build Studio – read more about UDBS here.

Their project focused on an elevated structure atop Garfield’s water tower that would provide a panoramic view of the city (like Olafur Eliasson’s Rainbow Panorama), simultaneously making Garfield more visible and making Pittsburgh visible in a different way. The Garfield Hilltop Park will tackle 4 of our 6 priorities:

updates

We’ll update this page as plans continue to develop. You can help by posting a comment or sending us an email. We’d like to hear your thoughts.
This project is part of cityLAB’s 6% Place – read more about the experiment and how the Garfield Hilltop Park supports the 6% Place here.